A man, a mule and a mission / Conceptual artist Marc Horowitz tests a new/old way to run errands through the streets of San Francisco

Dave Ford, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, June 25, 2004

Marc leadds, "Hail" as Adeline Jones, 11 rides atop "Audrey" as they make their way up 9th st. south of Market. Adeline's dad owns the animals. San Francisco performance artist Marc Horowitz spends the day riding a mule to take him to his various errands he needed to get done. As part of his "Errand Fesability Study". event on 6/12/04 in San Francisco Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle less

Marc leadds, "Hail" as Adeline Jones, 11 rides atop "Audrey" as they make their way up 9th st. south of Market. Adeline's dad owns the animals. San Francisco performance artist Marc Horowitz spends the day ... more

Photo: Michael Macor

Photo: Michael Macor

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Marc leadds, "Hail" as Adeline Jones, 11 rides atop "Audrey" as they make their way up 9th st. south of Market. Adeline's dad owns the animals. San Francisco performance artist Marc Horowitz spends the day riding a mule to take him to his various errands he needed to get done. As part of his "Errand Fesability Study". event on 6/12/04 in San Francisco Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle less

Marc leadds, "Hail" as Adeline Jones, 11 rides atop "Audrey" as they make their way up 9th st. south of Market. Adeline's dad owns the animals. San Francisco performance artist Marc Horowitz spends the day ... more

Photo: Michael Macor

A man, a mule and a mission / Conceptual artist Marc Horowitz tests a new/old way to run errands through the streets of San Francisco

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Art is fun, art is cool, art can be made on a mule. So thinks San Francisco conceptual artist Marc Horowitz. At the moment, he is walking into the outdoor sporting goods store REI, in San Francisco's South of Market district, to return a camping stove stand.

Like many San Franciscans on this day, Horowitz is running errands. Unlike any of them, he is doing it riding a mule followed by a pack donkey. It is part of an art project he calls an "errand feasibility study." Horowitz wants to make errands fun -- and, apparently, to mess with the corporate mind. He approaches a row of cashiers.

Horowitz heads outside, and then leads Audrey, a white, 800-pound Arabian mule, into the store. Pescadero rancher Doug Jones trails him leading a donkey named Hail. Jones owns both beasts and has leased them to Horowitz to make his art statement today. Two guys with video cameras record the action.

Bewildered and amused store patrons stare as Horowitz stands in line. Presently, a man in a Hawaiian print shirt and black shorts approaches. His name is David, and he is a store manager. In a friendly tone he asks if Horowitz has cleared the project "through corporate." Horowitz, all gee-whiz innocence, says no, and David asks that he get approval for any video taken in the store.

"It's not every day we have a donkey coming through the store," David says. Still, he adds, the store is happy to be supportive: "It sounds like a pretty fun project."

"Yeah, no harm done," Horowitz says.

"No worries," David replies, and the two men part amicably.

Horowitz is exactly the kind of performance artist you want to take home to Mom, if Mom happens to be insane. The first phase of his study, challenging the stereotype that errand-running is an isolating quotidian bore, found him doing errands with strangers he met on Craigslist. The second phase, on the mule, is meant to make errands delightful.

Horowitz, who is 27, doesn't limit art wit to the quadruped ass. Just this year he has eaten evening meals with strangers met on the Internet in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and St. Simons Island, Ga.; offered Alamo Square Park passersby free coffee from a pot powered by 1,300 feet of extension cord from his apartment; worn a large plastic spaceman's helmet to try on turtlenecks in an upscale clothing store; and played Stuffed Animal Golf, which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's absurdist stuff, dada in the extreme. Like all tricksters, Horowitz exists to subvert status quo power paradigms. "It's process-oriented humor, experiential humor," he says, citing the comedian Andy Kaufman as a kind of spirit guide. (Another is San Francisco wag Mal Sharpe.) The humor veers from the kindly (let's do errands together!) to the mildly aggressive (hi, can I bring my mule into your store?), but never really attacks. "I can't make fun of people," Horowitz says. "I'm too busy making sure everyone is all right. It's this motherly thing in me."

A little past 9:30 a.m. on this sun-kissed late spring Saturday, Horowitz watches Jones maneuver his truck and horse trailer into a row of parking spaces outside the Western Addition flat Horowitz shares with three roommates. Jones is joined by his 11-year-old daughter, Addie. She sports a tie-dyed T- shirt and a single waist-length braid.

Jones, 44, is a stout man with a voice that sounds like a fat stick slapping a barn. A high-tech worker by day, he lives on his 40-acre KMSA Ranch in Pescadero with his wife, Paula, Addie and Addie's 8-year-old sister, Nicole. Jones owns three mules and two donkeys. Audrey is 14, Hail, 9. Jones says a "good specimen" of donkey can live to 50, mules to 30. Both work into their 20s. A mule can carry about one-quarter of its body weight, Jones says.

Mules are hybrid animals; unlike donkeys, they cannot reproduce. Audrey is an Arab mule: her pop was a donkey, her momma an Arab steed. She looks like a horse, of course, of course. Hail got his name when he was born at midnight in a hailstorm.

Walking city streets is not easy on horseshoes such as Audrey's. "No way would we trot or gallop," Jones says. "It would shatter her foot."

Now, Jones ties the beasts to a nearby tree and there they stand, blandly watching the world, a curious sight even in the leafiest of urban neighborhoods.
Cars
slow. A man ambling past shakes his head, saying, "I knew my morning was going to be strange."

A small group of Horowitz's friends sits on his stoop sipping coffee and kibitzing. Horowitz burns off nervous energy offering bagels, telling jokes. He is 6 foot 2 and hale, a former high school football player who also ran track. An unruly shock of light brown hair tops a face inset with buggish blue- green eyes. Rabbity front teeth lend a cartoonish quality to a mouth framed by full, sensual lips. His is a seemingly honest Midwesterner's face, perfect for running cons -- or art projects upending assumptions.

Nearby, Jones outfits Audrey with a Western mountain-riding saddle. Hail gets a sawbuck-style pack saddle hung with two large canvas bags for toting goodies. Donning a green equestrian helmet not unlike a bicyclist's, Horowitz lifts himself atop Audrey, who shuffles skittishly before settling. "Whoa, dude," he tells her.

Soon the little party departs. Led by Jones, who holds a purple lead rope, Horowitz, on Audrey, is followed by Hail, led by Addie. Behind them, astride a Harley-Davidson Road King, is San Francisco police officer Paul Schloffeldt, who will route traffic. At first he seems bemused by Horowitz's project. "I'm just going to try to help him get his mission accomplished and stay safe," Schloffeldt says, "whatever his mission is."

One of Horowitz's friends calls out, "Are you sure you don't just want to drive?" Everyone laughs. Then the sound fades away, replaced by the clippety- clop of hooves on McAllister Street, a decidedly odd noise in a city that prides itself on the odd.

Horowitz conceived of the mule idea five years ago, while living in Los Gatos and commuting to a Mountain View technology company during the dot-com boom. "I was sitting in traffic one day and thought, 'I could do this faster on a mule,' " he says.

Thinking and doing are two different things. "He's very eccentric," Sean McDonald, a 31-year-old Belmont artist, says of Horowitz, whom he's known for a year. McDonald adds, "He takes things beyond the idea stage."

Horowitz began planning the project in December, and spent half a year navigating city bureaucracy to secure a permit (from, of all places, the Film and Video Commission), and a police officer.

An ironically cool, classic rust-colored Oldsmobile Cutlass sidles up Steiner Street and idles at the stop sign at McAllister. Its passengers, two young women and a man, sit gape-jawed as Horowitz and his entourage pass. A block later, two young Mormon men in black suits walk past, unblinking; what must they be thinking about the sinning city they've been sent to save?

At the first stop, Majesty Cleaners, at Fell and Fillmore streets, Horowitz drops off dry cleaning. Shop owner Leona Zhao's 6-year-old son Roger gazes at Audrey and Hail through the front window. Asked if he'd run errands on a mule, Roger giggles, then shakes his head a resolute no.

En route again, and a man on a bright yellow motorcycle gives Horowitz a black-gloved, devil's horn "rock-on" hand sign. Inside the JHW Key Shop on Fillmore Street, the next stop, Trevor Burgess, a ruddy-faced man of 75, leans against the counter. "Anything could happen in this town," he says. "You could ride an elephant up the street. And it would have rights. That's the next thing -- everyone has rights. It would probably vote Democrat."

"Are you a Democrat?" Horowitz asks.

"Hell no," Burgess grouses.

"Oh, no, oh, no," Horowitz replies gently. Yet he engages Burgess in a political discussion by the end of which the pair has reached a sort of sociable consensus. Later, Horowitz will point out that, by doing errands on a mule, "I got to talk to a Republican today. I never would have had that chance. "

Horowitz is getting keys copied for his mother, Karen Meyer, soon to visit from Sacramento. "My mom is very eccentric," Horowitz muses. "She talks an awful lot. That's where I learned it. She'll talk to anyone. She'd talk to a pole." But, he adds, "She was cool. She let me do whatever the hell I wanted. "

Horowitz was born in the summer of 1976 in Westerville, Ohio, then a town of about 17,000. Meyer was a schoolteacher, her then-husband,
Burton Horowitz
, a pharmacist. Early on, Marc showed the oddball humor that suggests a future as a conceptual artist or prison inmate.

His first press recognition came from the Westerville News when, at 9, he organized a break-dancing competition for senior citizens. As MC, he decked himself out in tight Izod tennis shorts, a grey tank top emblazoned "Breakin" and a Michael Jackson white glove. At 10, he had his first business, Ghostbusters and Cleaning Service. "I was just dreaming up these asinine projects from an early age," he says.

The family moved around, winding up in Sacramento, but Horowitz left home at 15. "Home troubles," he says. He migrated to Chandler, Ind., where he lived with a friend's family and attended high school. His business acumen sharpened; using a fake ID, he bought beer to sell to fellow students. But Johnny Law caught on; cops chased Horowitz, who was drunk, in the parking lot of a school football game. "They tackled me face down in the street," he says. "It was a very bad moment in my life."

Eventually, he straightened up and entered Indiana University. He earned a degree in business marketing "because I wanted money. I didn't have it growing up." After traveling overseas, he landed in Silicon Valley, working at a graphics firm. Bored and restless, he earned a master of fine arts degree in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, and has since lectured there and at Stanford.

In the past two years, he has participated in solo and group shows locally and in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York.

Scott Soares
of Potrero Hill is finishing a croissant sandwich, sipping a beer and chatting with friends at a table outside the Squat and Gobble Café, on Fillmore Street, when Horowitz and company stop for coffee. Soares says he'd do errands on a mule "because I would attract attention, and it would be fun." Why attract attention? "Because," Soares says, smiling, "I'm in San Francisco."

Horowitz understands. He says he's moved 40 times in his life. Typical new-kid-in-school story, class clown division. "It was, 'How do I get attention?' " he says. When his kindergarten teacher left the classroom to take a phone call, Horowitz organized fellow students to hide and scare her when she returned. "She freaked out," he says. "I got in serious trouble. I thought, 'Aha, that's it, that's the ticket.' "

He next persuaded peers that aliens lived behind the school. "I had 600 students lined up, single file, at the fence, and I'm running up and down yelling, 'Now look for shiny metallic objects!' The teachers came out, and they were so f -- ing mad."

No aliens presented themselves. "After that, my credibility was shot," Horowitz says. "I was The Weird Guy. 'There's the weird guy.' I didn't have many friends."

If an art project falls in the city and there are no media to record it, does it make a sound (or, more important, garner grants)? Horowitz's mule project won't settle the question. He is trailed by a newspaper reporter and photographer. Two videographers -- San Franciscan Jason Bryan, 25, and Clark Caldwell, 28, of Oakland -- record footage for Horowitz's Web site. A local TV news crew interviews Horowitz outside Squat and Gobble. He tells them that, from his high-up perch, it's clear from the smiles that people dig his idea. "When I go by a bus," he says, "all I see is teeth."
At Photoworks, on Market Street, Horowitz drops off film. "These are errands I've been meaning to do for a long, long time," he says. It's not as though he doesn't have transportation: He owns a 1993 Mazda B-3000 truck and a bicycle. It stands to reason that, in an Audrey-less world, they'd do just fine for errand running. Also, Audrey has no sound system.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, east on Market Street. The sun sears. Weariness sets in, not just in the quadrupeds. The sense arises that a project meant to make errands less tedious is becoming, alas, tedious.

A half hour later, at the South of Market Trader Joe's, Horowitz makes a food run for everyone. Outside, parents approach Audrey and Hail toting kids who appear alternately tickled and nonplussed. Michelle Hyde, shopping with her husband, Patrick, and their 17-month-old son Aiden, says, "I wish I had a mule, especially with the price of gas." Mules: the new SUV?

Returning with a basketful of snack food, Horowitz counts his project a success so far. "No people have gotten stepped on," he muses.

Rainbow flags flap-flap and tree leaves hiss as wind whips down Market Street. At Ninth Street the troupe idles while Horowitz bink-bonks ATM buttons. Hail twitches. "He's getting bored," Jones says. Hail's not alone. It is midafternoon in the land of drooping spirits; eyes take on a faraway glaze.

The troupe straggles east on Grove Street. Horowitz says riding past Civic Center is "kind of poetic. It makes you wonder, what would it have been like 100, 150 years ago?"

People hail Horowitz from cars, as they've done all day. Those in Horowitz's group take it in stride. What started out as surprising for the little troupe has, nearly five hours later, become normal. In this sense, Horowitz's hope that the project would foster community is borne out.

"The work pulls people together," Horowitz says. "It doesn't set people aside, like a lot of comedy does. It's inclusive."

Just past Gough Street, the same guy from the morning, riding the bright yellow motorcycle, zooms past. He gives Horowitz another devil's horn sign. Symmetry.

A few minutes later, Audrey and Hail munch grass at a low wall bordering the eastern edge of Alamo Square Park. "I should charge the city a mowing fee, " Horowitz jokes.

Ten minutes after that, the group finishes where it started. Later, Horowitz says, "When I was done I was like, whoa, it happened."

Horowitz boils with ideas. "I've got this nervous energy all the time," he says. "I'm constantly doing something. My mind is constantly working." He fills a notebook a month. "It's like a personal factory," he says.

Future projects may include taking a cab from here to New York, which he estimates will cost between $5,000 and $10,000. "I'll call a cab, have a wad of cash and say, 'Take me to Manhattan,' " he says. Other possibilities include encasing a 1969 Camaro SS in Lucite, living in a modular home being transported to the East Coast and running a full marathon in his apartment hallway.

None of that makes it easy to nurture the relationship with his girlfriend of four months. "The projects demand so much energy," he says. Plus, he adds with a laugh, "If I didn't have the projects I would have a down payment to put on a house, and stronger relationships in general."

Still, the attention-seeking trickster pulls him. "I'm an adult doing these projects that I would have done when I was 6 years old if I'd had the resources," he says.

Five reasons to run errands using a mule

1. Saves gas.

2. Chicks and dudes dig it.

3. Kids love you.

4. No speeding tickets.

5. You can call it art - and get away with it.

For information

To learn more about artist Marc Horowitz and to see video footage of his mule-top errands, visit www.ineedtostopsoon.com